Red Zen Marketing

It's one of the most common mistakes I've seen new product development teams make, time and again.

Regardless of the firm's industry or category, or whether it's a physical product or software, all too often the team in charge of a bringing a new product to market lose their way--they lose touch with the customer.

Development teams encounter a single problem or focus on a single dimension of the product and begin to get wrapped around the axle on that area. Slowly the initial impetus behind development of the product or service recedes into the background; the customer need/opportunity--the Voice of the Customer--becomes obscured by the deliberations and problem-solving that begin to consume the development team. As this occurs, the concentration of attention moves inward. Focus becomes parochial, with thinking centered around what is best for the firm or on the barriers to making changes. New constraints become givens for the project, even if the project started as an innovation-focused project to reinvent the firm and bring grand new opportunities to bear. I call it the molasses effect.

Examples of subtle obstructionist mindset shifts that occur:
"We want it to look entirely different but It has be made on our existing line."
"This is the best market opportunity but we have to address it without undermining our current channel."
"We know it needs to have those features, but we have to get to market by X so those will have to wait."
"There might be better technologies to do X/Y, but we don't have people who understand those, and besides, we know how to do Z."

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Yes, I can also think of examples where the raising of those exact objections was warranted, and there is a long story behind each one. Granted, But for each of those exceptions, there are many, many more times that these phrases were overheard in cases where they were nothing but excuses for sticking to the status quo. And, often the reason is fear.

So. How is this best avoided?

1. Use a cross-functional team. Don't allow the development process to proceed to far being run by any one group--whether engineering, R&D, software development, marketing, manufacturing, etc. As appropriate, gather a group from the relevant areas of the firm to participate on the team, led by a strong project manager who does not dictate product outcomes, but guides the project progress and accountability, and let ideas flow against the project timeline.
   
2. Ensure that the product development team--those in the trenches on the team, actively involved in weekly meetings--are closely involved in understanding end customer requirements, desires, frustrations, & needs. I happen to be biased toward use of the Voice of the Customer methods that have proven their efficacy over and over again, but successful products come out of other customer intimacy/research methods as well. 
3. Use Personas in the development process, to keep the target segment customer clearly in the mind of the development team. Personalizing the customer in this way is incredibly powerful, whether the product is a window, an electric fan, a pizza buffet, an online banking service, or an iPhone software app. 
4. Open your mind to partnerships. The best solution may involve working with other firms. Novel solutions to difficult problems in todays connected, global marketplace need not be all resolved "in house". Think "who has the pieces to complete this puzzle?" and take the step of approaching and asking for ideas or assistance. Think win/win. Having a smaller piece of a huge pie is usually a good thing. There's a reason most consumer electronics firms (think Apple, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, etc.) don't actually assemble most of their products themselves, but rely on partners like Flextronics and HTC to do this for them. When siding maker NuCedar ran into a difficulty with paint retention, they went directly to Sherwin Williams for help, and found a willing partner who helped them enter the market with a jaw-dropping 1400-color pallet, dwarfing vinyl siding choices and offering a UV reflective finish to reduce summer heat absorption.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Look to other industries for solutions. Often, others have solved the problem you are up against in a slightly parallel industry for a different reason. It may take some research (luckily there's lots of great tools for that these days!) but it will be out there, perhaps written about in a different industry's trade journal. Try to define the problem on a different level when you search.
   
6. Perhaps it should have been listed first, but this final recommendation comes straight from the second of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits: Start with the End in Mind. In this case, as you move forward in development, the team should always be doing their best to be visualizing the characteristics of the ideal product/solution. These are now 'how' aspects (not features), but are the benefit aspects of the product or service. "It will let me unlock my car while laying in bed on a cold morning" is a visualization of the ideal product outcome. As product development proceeds, this skeletal vision should become fleshed out with more benefits and aspects surrounding the core benefit to the customer, meeting the primary need. Keeping this in mind focuses development in a powerful way, and is similar in many ways to the AGILE method of software development in which the most important/necessary/core aspects of the software are developed first, quickly, in order to create constantly working code. Then, additional features are added to this core, always being sure to test the operating prototype against customers' needs to validate its alignment. By extension, this idea of frequent prototyping also helps to keep things on track, and is a corollary to this same idea, as it is the embodiment of keeping the 'end in mind'.
   

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All true -- as unbelievable as it sounds.

I once was rejected from a pool of candidates for a job at Avaya because I told the interviewer that when releasing a the most recent version of a previous employer's mobile office suite, the product requirements AND the feature set remained fixed for the final 2/3 of the development cycle prior to release. I'm sure that he was likely an advocate of the Agile Programming development method (hey, I think it's a great method as well and has it's place) and believed that the feature set would remain fluid based on constantly changing user input much later in the process.

Well, having worked in many different industries spanning consumer durables products like ladders and windows, as well as high tech products like software, hardware, and even online Software-as-a-Service, I can say that the real answer to that question of "how late is it acceptable to continue to make changes to your product" actually depends on the product, the customers being served, and the environmental variables involved.  My adversarial interviewer at Avaya wanted to hear his preferred answer parroted back to him, and was unwilling to listen to the reasons why our particular mobile office suite, already quite mature on the old, stale Palm OS platform by then, was not going to be seeing late-breaking feature changes and additions. No matter, for whomever he eventually hired didn't make much of a splash--the project I was interviewing to lead was shelved or fell into obscurity 8 months later as a result of shifting priorities. I guess he didn't see those late breaking "customer requirements" on the horizon, for all his openness to last minute changes. Oops.

Back to bras
So what does all this have to do with bras? Well, as I blogged about earlier, my wife and her friends have been working on a special benefit project-- designing a bra to benefit the American Cancer Society in our area that is hosting an Unhooked bra design competition to benefit cancer research. My dear wife and pals have spent over 30 hours in total working on creating a very uniquely decorated pink bra using the theme Milk and Cookies. 

This theme ties in to another nonprofit benefit that is the passion of Jen DeFazio, one of my wife's dear friends, who some years ago conceived of the Stacking the Odds benefit event for breast cancer. In this event, individuals (or teams?) stack Nabisco Oreo cookies to see how many cookies they can stack up upon a base of a single standard Oreo cookie. It's a fascinating premise for a competition and I can hardly wait to see it this year. Anyhoo--the bra design you see below represents how their design finally came together. 

"Um, what about this whole product development angle and bras? You lost me..."
Yeah, understandable-- just bear with me here. (Fitting bra pictures into a marketing blog is not so easy, folks.)  Well, it all comes down to being flexible to changing concepts and circumstances and needs.

The initial concept for the bra design was Jen's. Milk and Cookies -- makes sense; ties in to the Stacking theme nicely. Jen wanted a pink bra to convey the color of the pink ribbon used by Susan G Komen for the Cure and other breast cancer foundations. She also wanted to find someway to tie the milk theme in in a fun, lighthearted way. And, well, the cookies were obvious. I observed seven ladies working on this project the other evening. During that time, they realized that they could not use perishable items.

This posed a problem. Cookies had to be simulated. Hmmm. A quick search on Wikipedia turned up a bit of suitable Oreo cookie art (since removed!) that was reborn as a reversed iron-on for dark brown or black felt. The ladies had wanted to position some sort of vessel behind the D-cups connected to the taps in the tips of the bras, to be able to turn on the milk at will. That seemed untenable as well. Warm milk was, well, icky. Rolling white paint around the interior of the cups seemed to do the trick nicely--indicating the idea of a full milk container. But, well, they weren't going to connect to the taps too well. Hoses and other intricate connectors were postulated--and rejected.

After some debate, and the first day of long hours designing expired, the ladies left for some sleep. A new day and the challenge still faced them. What to do about the milk? Voila! Inspiration at the grocery store-- pink milk in the form of Dean's Strawberry Milk. This was particularly relevant, since Deans Dairy had been a past sponsor of Jen's Stacking the Odds event in eastern Ohio. It was all coming together. Now, the Milk Chug was positioned within the bra, full size Oreo's were mocked up with a half-eaten cookie left with it's crumbs next to the empty milk container, and the bra design we finally mounted on a presentation board embellished with gold ribbon icons.

                   

Click here to download:

A_Lesson_on_Product_Developmen.zip (1445 KB)

Flexibility in the design concept had ensured success. If any of the initial concepts had been held to too stringently, the design would have come off too forced. Creativity and serendipity each had a role to play in creating the final product.

Often in product development we fail to be open to serendipity because we become too focused on our initial thoughts of where we are headed. Like the Avaya head of R&D, we have our preconceived notions of the answers we're looking for and fail to ask new questions that might illuminate the situtation, or fail to open our eyes in mundane circumstances -- like the Jen in the grocery store -- to see new possibilities that enable new creative solutions.

Where do you need to open your eyes to new possibilities in your business. Where could your customers help you see differently?

Yes, I can help... 

Mike Compeau
Red Zen Marketing
www.twitter.com/mikecompeau
724-734-1624

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Perhaps my favorite business illustration ever, this really nails the worst case New Product Development situation to a tee. Enjoy. (Yes, I can help with that...)
 
Mike Compeau
mike.compeau@compeau.net
www.twitter.com/mikecompeau

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I've been finding myself with more and more projects that will involve collaboration with others--some across town, and others across the globe--lately. So, though I've been a Basecamp user for years on and off, I decided it was time to have another good look at what was available. In fact, I even worked with one very innovative company that created a very solid mobile integration solution for Basecamp called TrailGuide a few years ago for Windows Mobile prior to iPhone application development taking off. At the other end of the spectrum, while a consultant at Mural Consulting, we'd used SharePoint somewhat, which rescued a certain Microsoft project along the way for one team, and I'd also had some experience working with SMBLive's SharePoint interface layer innovation called Workspace, which found life initially as BT Workspace and has since been picked up by various other telecoms in their offerings. So, I've used light-weight and 'robust' enterprise class solutions for project management and team collaboration quite a bit over the past 8 years or so.

I have to admit, I've never been a huge lover of Basecamp. (Ducks to avoid flying vegetables.) Though I give Jason Fried and the gang all their due for their minimalist product development chuzpah and creating Ruby on Rails, etc., I find the solution just doesn't work the way I like to work. Or, at least the way I worked when I was using Basecamp then. I relied on Outlook for email (another duck) and I found the all/nothing notifications from Basecamp useful at times and overkill at others. It didn't read my mind. I found it a hassle to remember multiple passwords and logins (some projects were on client's accounts, some were mine) and sometimes I was waiting for browsers to open when I just needed a quick bit of information. It was annoyingly burdensome overhead at times. It was also wonderfully elegant and simple to use for others I worked with--which has been a huge part of its appeal.

So, anyhoo-- I'm going to be relooking at this category over the next many days.

I'd expected initially to have my review ready for tomorrow. Fat chance. Look for it by mid next week, folks. Should be interesting, and very useful.

Oh, the products I'll be looking at in no particular order are shown above: Zoho Projects, attask, Manymoon, Central Desktop, GoPlan, 5pm, and Basecamp. If youve got other suggestions, email me, but they won't make it into this round or the wrapup will never get written, folks! :)

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